I forgot to add that a friend of mine was living in Manhattan and working across the river in New Jersey that year. He changed trains at the subway station under the Towers...about 15 minutes before the first plane hit. He was safely across the river when the second plane began its approach.

He has always been an avid semi-pro photographer, so he takes a camera with him everywhere (except to bed), and he sent me one shot of the scene from across the river, with the second plane about a mile from the Towers. If anyone wants to see it, tell me, and I'll post it here. Frankly, I can barely stand to look at it...It is SO ominous...

That morning I was getting dressed for work and just got out of the shower, and saw the TV and a jet crashing into one of the trade centers and yelled at my wife hey looks like their making a new movie involving jets crashing into building this time instead of the Sands hotel and Casino in Vegas, because I live in Las Vegas, NV and remember them shooting Con-Air and the C-130 flying around the Stratosphere Hotel and Casino during filming. It wasn't until I got to work when I found out that it really was happening.

I just posted John Vanover's photograph in my Profile, if anyone wants to see it. Looking at it still bothers me a lot...probably always will. I think of the passengers and crew on that plane...knowing they were going to die...I can't even imagine what they felt.

PS: Very little has been said here (or anywhere else) about the fourth plane...the one whose passengers fought back, and managed to bring the aircraft down in an empty field. Is there a Medal of Honor for civilians? If not, there should be.

I was living in Cleveland then, and I remember hearing the news anchors announce how all planes have been ordered to be grounded, then not 5 minutes late, Flight 93 passed over. I remember staring at it in horror as it was turning/heading east, wondering where it was heading to - somewhere local, or to DC or NYC or some other metropolitan. Then later on in the coming days, hearing about how they fought and eventually brought the plane down just a mile or so from where I had been camping over Labor Day weekend...

They don't have Medals of Honor for civilians, but the people who are known to have fought back have had American flags handed to their families in ceremonies, most of them within that month. They were definitely recognized for it as best as civilians could be.

I just found this, and it seems that the Far Right are now trying to condemn Paul Krugman as "unpatriotic." I thought patriotism meant to support your country when it's doing the correct thing, and to try to fix it when it's doing something wrong.... I thought....

The Years of Shame

Is it just me, or are the 9/11 commemorations oddly subdued?

Actually, I don’t think it’s me, and it’s not really that odd.

What happened after 9/11 — and I think even people on the right know this, whether they admit it or not — was deeply shameful. The atrocity should have been a unifying event, but instead it became a wedge issue. Fake heroes like Bernie Kerik, Rudy Giuliani, and, yes, George W. Bush raced to cash in on the horror. And then the attack was used to justify an unrelated war the neocons wanted to fight, for all the wrong reasons.

A lot of other people behaved badly. How many of our professional pundits — people who should have understood very well what was happening — took the easy way out, turning a blind eye to the corruption and lending their support to the hijacking of the atrocity?

The memory of 9/11 has been irrevocably poisoned; it has become an occasion for shame. And in its heart, the nation knows it.

I’m not going to allow comments on this post, for obvious reasons.

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I sorta wish he had allowed comments, but I suppose the majority would have been spam from the vicious "reel uhmurricunz," that make me wonder what their mothers ate and drank while they were pregnant. (And if they fitted them out with little KKK robes as soon as they were born...complete with pointy hoods for their pointy heads.)